Red On Red: Native American Literary Separatism - Softcover

Womack, Craig S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816630232 ISBN 13: 9780816630233

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1999

Synopsis

An entertaining and enlightening proposal for a new way to read Native American literature.

An entertaining and enlightening proposal for a new way to read Native American literature.

How can a square peg fit into a round hole? It can’t. How can a door be unlocked with a pencil? It can’t. How can Native literature be read applying conventional postmodern literary criticism? It can’t.

That is Craig Womack’s argument in Red on Red. Indian communities have their own intellectual and cultural traditions that are well equipped to analyze Native literary production. These traditions should be the eyes through which the texts are viewed. To analyze a Native text with the methods currently dominant in the academy, according to the author, is like studying the stars with a magnifying glass.

In an unconventional and piercingly humorous appeal, Womack creates a dialogue between essays on Native literature and fictional letters from Creek characters who comment on the essays. Through this conceit, Womack demonstrates an alternative approach to American Indian literature, with the letters serving as a “Creek chorus” that offers answers to the questions raised in his more traditional essays. Topics range from a comparison of contemporary oral versions of Creek stories and the translations of those stories dating back to the early twentieth century, to a queer reading of Cherokee author Lynn Riggs’s play The Cherokee Night.

Womack argues that the meaning of works by Native peoples inevitably changes through evaluation by the dominant culture. Red on Red is a call for self-determination on the part of Native writers and a demonstration of an important new approach to studying Native works-one that engages not only the literature, but also the community from which the work grew.

ISBN 0-8166-3022-4Cloth£33.50$47.95xx

ISBN 0-8166-3023-2Paper£13.00$18.95x

288 Pages5 7/8 x 9November

Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

About this title

About the Author

Craig S. Womack is assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. He is Muskogee Creek and Cherokee.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816630232
• ISBN 13: 9780816630233
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352